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Printed letters, January 30, 2013

Ever since the school shooting at Newtown, I see and read more and more each day that we should go and arm the teachers or school personnel in order to stop these shootings.

Yet I also hear and read in the news practically every other day how children were able to pick up weapons left out by supposedly responsible adults and fire the weapons, either harming themselves or someone else.

Now we are asking our teachers to take on something else to be held accountable for. These teachers are already being asked to be accountable and responsible for enough each and every day in our schools.

Now we want teachers to take on an even bigger responsibility, and they may not even have any familiarity or knowledge on what to do with any type of weapon.

With all the activities that teachers have going on in a day at work, who is to say that they might not inadvertently leave this weapon out in a place where a child could pick it up and accidently have it fire? Then what do we do?

Each and every parent out there with a child of school age needs to think about this before allowing any school district to arm its teachers and allow weapons into their child’s school.

JAMES OWEN

Fruita

Limiting magazine capacity won’t help stem violence

After listening to weeks of talk from anti-gun advocates, I have come to the conclusion that they do not understand guns and the laws that are in effect.

The so-called assault rifles some people are trying to ban may look like military weapons, but they are not. Military assault weapons are fully automatic and can fire all the cartridges in the magazine just by holding the trigger down.

It is illegal for a U.S. citizen to own a fully automatic weapon or one of greater than 50 caliber unless it is registered with the ATF and a substantial fee is paid for each weapon. This law was put into effect in the 1930s.

Manufacturers have made their standard weapons look like assault weapons because buyers like the look. You or I can take a standard Ruger 10/22 .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle and buy a new stock that makes it look like an assault rifle. It is still a 10/22 rifle.

Trying to restrict magazine capacity is a joke. Changing magazines on a rifle takes fewer than two seconds, so a criminal will carry four 10-round magazines instead of two 20-round magazines and will be four seconds slower.

This would not have made any difference in what happened in Colorado or Connecticut.

Anti-gun advocates don’t understand the fun derived from shooting at targets. They believe that if you have a gun you are ready to kill some animal or someone.

Great competitions take place throughout the U.S. every year from cowboy shooting to NRA shooting events. Assault-type rifles are fun to shoot, and so are all guns.

Those who have never tried to shoot a gun should take a trip to the range and see what shooting is all about. Punch a few holes into some paper.

ROBERT KLEIN

Grand Junction

Gun-control groups see opportunity in crisis

This whole gun-control issue to me seems really irrational and blown way out of perspective.

Way more people die every year from baseball bats, hammers and fists, but we aren’t rushing to restrict them. There is risk to life. Bad people exist and bad things happen.

If we could magically remove all of the weapons from the world, then we might be able to restrict their access. The problem is that there already are lots of these weapons here, and we essentially have an open-door policy across the Mexican border.

New ones could be brought through, and since their sale is restricted, they would command a huge black-market price, further incentivizing black-market sales and trafficking. Drugs are illegal, yet we can get them easily.

If there are fewer guns, then violence could be from bombs, poisonings or simply driving a pickup truck through the playground, running over kids at recess.

The shooter in Aurora had enough homemade explosives in his apartment to kill way more people than he shot. The point is, if someone wants to harm others, he or she will.

The whole gun-control movement seems typical of the idealistic, but often-shortsighted thought process prevalent today. It’s always someone or something else’s fault, and the government needs to fix it for us. However, the fix usually involves more government or taking away or restricting our liberties in some form.

I think the idea of “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is really what is going on here. Hopefully, Americans are smart enough not to buy into it.

AARON J. BEBEE

Grand Junction

Congressional wordiness limited Clinton’s responses

Many questions directed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent congressional hearings were excellent, but never answered.

Why? Because politicians can’t stop talking. Instead of asking a question and waiting for an answer, the congressman would go on and on until his time was up.